A little casual video capture help needed.

[RichL]

I'm looking for a Newbies Guide to Video Capture Using Old Hardware That Everyone Else Threw Away Years Ago, or something similar.

I only want to do the occasional capture of probably upto a minute of video from composite input, in good quality but with a small enough file size it can be posted on the Web.
My current rig for doing this is an AMDk6III/475, 288mb Ram, 20gb 7200rpm disk (ata33) and a Matrox Mystique and Rainbow Runner using Windows 98SE

I found a copy of Ulead Media Studio Pro 6 (okay okay, It was warezed) to try out, and was able to successfully capture 30 seconds of video in fullscreen MJPEG at 30fps. Quality was superb, but the file size was over 800mb. I fiddled around a bit and captured again at half screen and got a load of crap that took up 340mb.

[landrover]

So? Maybe you could be more specific about this load of crap you mentioned.

Apart from that, it seems like all you have to do is resize and convert your MJPEG file using a WM8 or DivX and mail your stuff.

landrover

[RichL]

Well, the load of crap was the same bit of video as before, except the picture was horribly grainy, poor colours and skipped and jumped. Obviously I changed the wrong setting somewhere.

[az]

I'd generally capture at the best quality possible (even uncompressed, but your system won't be able to handle that), and then compress afterwards. I'd use DivX5 to compress. I use VirtualDub for capturing, resizing, cutting, and compressing. It's free, and provides everything I need.

If you want the file to be small enough to post it on the web or to mail it, you'll never use full resolution. Try half or even a quarter of the original resolution. Half the horizontal and vertical resolution means a file only a quarter the size of the original res one. Capturing at half the resolution has one additional advantage: You won't be having any headaches with you source's interleaved signal (where all the odd lines are in one frame, then all the even ones in the next, then the odd ones again, and so on), because you'll use only the even or odd lines (you only use one "field"), thus avoiding nasty jaggies.

Further tips to reduce file size:

Reduce frames per second. if you're capturing NTSC material, you'll capture at 60 fps. 30 may be enough, maybe even 15 will look ok. Half the fps=half the file size (I think this is not really true for MPEG-like compression, but it reduces file size regardless of the compression used). Use only integer dividers though, or it'll become jerky.

If it doesn't need sound, turn it off. Sound uses more space than you think. If it needs sound, will it work with worse audio quality, which also uses less space? Use compression for sound too.

Of course, I'm a computer video newbie, too, so I might be wrong about some of these. And keep in mind that the person to watch the file will need the corresponding CODEC(s) - but an MPEG-1 file (for which windows has built-in support, so there's no need for a new codec) won't become small enough

Hope this helps.

AZ